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ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

alien-project.org

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Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#131

Post by vokep »

EMM_386 wrote: post #82
phkahler wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If we're in a simulation that just begs the question - what is the "real" universe that the simulation is running in. It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility. No more satisfying that "where was god before he created the universe?" The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is suffici…

> The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist. This then leads to how does math exist instead of nothing? Math is a concept, and if concepts exist then that is not "nothing". Many people confuse "nothing" with the vacuum of space and particles appearing out of nowhere. In this case, we have something (space, vacuums, an…

Because nothing is precisely what does exist. But nothing implies something, so my working theory is that nothing's implied opposite something is itself the first thing, then some cellular automata like progression results from similar logical self-reference and down the line our physics (and the entirety of every logical permutation of information n-dimensionally) results from that.

A similar conception I've heard is that its like something and nothing, at the beginning of time, made a bet whether there'd be something or nothing, but the act of making the bet was already something, rigging it in something's favor. Nothing thought that was bullshit and tried to call it so, and they've been battling it out ever since.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#133

Post by analognoise »

HelloNurse wrote: post #57
hhh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use the Nvidia docker runtime and put your application in a container?

Can you download a RTX 3080 from the Docker registry?

The hardware is a hell of a lot cheaper than wasting a week of engineering time though isn't it?

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#134

Post by ALittleLight »

cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

I worked on a similar project. One of the heritable traits I had was a quantity of energy that would be passed on to a child. A mother and father organism contributed a random half of their stats to a new child and both parents deducted their caretaker energy and increased the child's energy by the same amount.

I had a lot of different graphs to show me stats as the simulation continued. One thing I noticed was that after a while of this simulation "average age" started to go way up.

At first, I was proud. I thought I had evolved creatures that could live indefinitely in my simulated environment. I kind of had - but it didn't work like I thought. At some point the creatures seemed to become immortal and all new creatures died off. I was monitoring "average age at death" which confirmed all the dying creatures were very young and "average generation count" which showed it stabilized midway through the simulation and then locked in place. They got to a place where new organisms died off and there were a bunch of immortal organisms running around.

I finally figured out what had gone wrong. The stats, including caretaker energy, could be randomly modified by a small random value up or down whenever a child was produced. Nothing prevented caretaker energy from going negative, and indeed, that's what would happen. The simulation would work for a while while only a small number of organisms had negative caretaker energy, but eventually these guys would take over and become the whole population. They could indefinitely sustain themselves by having children, but their children (spawned by two parents who passed on negative energy) would instantly die.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#135

Post by hyperluz »

jhugard wrote: post #103
hyperluz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I see a frozen render. Maybe it only work on Intel CPUs...

Nope. Appears to be broken for Nvidia 10 series. I'm on Intel with a 1070ti + another user reports issues on the 1080ti (see similar post in this thread; reported to author here: https://github.com/chrxh/alien/issues/21 ).

Just informing that this really worked on an old i7 920 with 24 GB and a RTX 2060 Super (8GB). I didn't even need to install the CUDA SDK on this one.

Since the i7 920 supports less instructions than the 3700x, it really is a specific problem with the GTX 1070 (8GB)

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#136

Post by kkotak »

scottrogowski wrote: post #9

This is amazing. My question is whether there are emergent structures in a long-running sandbox environment? The videos that were posted appeared to have quite complex structures but it was unclear whether they were designed or if they "evolved" from earlier more-basic structures. Would be curious to get the author's take.

I wonder if multiple simulations show any level of convergence.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#137

Post by chrxr »

This is going to be a random comment, but the thing that struck me most was how close this person's Github username is to my own! github.com/chrxr vs github.com/chrxh. Feels bizarre. And seeing their actual name it appears there username has the same relationship to their real name as my own username.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#138

Post by edeion »

StandardFuture wrote: post #123
dragonwriter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata? Uh, it doesn't exist. Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model. > Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these. https://avida.devosoft.org/

> https://avida.devosoft.org/ Thanks for the link! > Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model. While I would like to believe you on that, one link does not seem sufficient to support the word "plenty" when the ratio of ALife projects built around CAs to not is extremely high.

I'll at least point to another example: http://aevol.fr/

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#139

Post by raphlinus »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #130
raphlinus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCL is sadly stagnant. Vulkan is a good choice but not itself portable. There are frameworks such as wgpu that run compute shaders (among other things) portably across a range of GPU hardware.

In what way is Vulkan not portable? It runs on all operating systems (Windows 7+, Linux, Android, and Apple via MoltenVK) and all GPUs (AMD GCN, nVidia Kepler, Intel), and shaders (compute and rendering) are to my knowledge standardized in the portable SPIR-V bytecode. WGPU is more portable, since it can use not only Vulkan but also other APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11, but Vulkan is already very highly portable fo…

It's kinda portable, but I've had not-great experiences with MoltenVK - piet-gpu doesn't work on it, for reasons I haven't dug into. It may be practical for some people to write Vulkan-only code.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#140

Post by cwkoss »

cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

My goal with this project was to be able to seed the world with a single proto-organism and have two distinct species - one predator and one prey - evolve to create a stable ecosystem.

I eventually localized food sources and added a bunch of additional rules, but was never able to realize this goal. I think for predator-prey relationships to evolve in my system it would have required sensory organs and methods to react to local environment.

Seems like ALiEn is able to simulate food chains with distinct species - and alas I don't have a CUDA GPU - but curious if they've been able to create an ecosystem where predators and prey can coexist in a balanced stable ecosystem. (In my experiments, it was very easy to get predator population explosion, all of the prey gets eaten, and then all of the predators die)

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